The Energy and Environment Program at the Baker Center strives to continue Senator Baker’s work in the areas of energy and environmental policy. The program examines how energy and environmental issues affect the quality of life for people around the world.
Among the issues addressed by the program are energy consumption and conservation; nuclear energy; renewable energy; air and water pollution; and climate change. The center hopes to study the interaction of energy and the environment to develop economically sound policies that improve the quality of life of the world’s citizens.
The center’s activities in energy and environmental policy programs have been strengthened by the establishment of key partnerships with other energy policy institutes, think tanks, professional societies, universities, national laboratories, and industries. The partnership between the Baker Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and the Tennessee Valley Authority is of particular importance in the program’s effort to develop energy and environmental policy.
The Baker Center Interdisciplinary Group provides a forum for the UT community to share their research findings to a broad set of academics, researchers, and students from outside their own discipline, but who have a common interest in environmental and energy issues. We invite roughly six speakers each semester from fields such as ecology, economics, urban planning, atmospheric chemistry and sociology to present on occasional Thursdays at 3:30pm in the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium. The BCIGEEP is led by the following faculty:
- Paul Armsworth, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
- Jake LaRiviere, Economics
- Becky Jacobs, College of Law
- Chris Clark, Agricultural Economics
Click on “Topic” of past speakers’ for a link to video of their talk.
Spring 2012
| Date | Speaker |
Topic |
|---|---|---|
| February 2012 | ||
| 2 | Rob Jackson, Professor, Biology Department, Duke University | Shale Gas and Its Environmental Footprint |
| 23 | Maxine Burkett, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hawaii & Director, Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy | In Search of Refuge: Climate Justice, Climate-Induced Migration, and the Law (Skype) |
| March 2012 | ||
| 8 | Alex Pfaff, Associate Professor, Sanford School Public Policy, Duke University | Topic: The Effect of Policy Design on Deforestation |
| 29 | Michael Price, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Tennessee | Using Social Comparisons to Influence ‘Green’ Behavior: Evidence from a Large Scale Field Experiment |
| April 2012 | ||
| 12 | Mercedes Pascual, Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan | Climate-driven infectious diseases in a changing human landscape: two case studies on cholera and malaria |
| 25 | Christine Todd Whitman, Former Governor of New Jersey and 9th Administrator of the EPA | The Need for Climate Change in Washington: How Hyper-Partisanship Has Paralyzed Policymaking. NOTE: 7:00pm in Baker Center |
| N/A | Dale Whittington, Professor, Departments of Environmental Sciences & Engineering and City & Regional Planning, University of North Carolina | Postponed until Fall 2012 |